Careful... your spam, sorry, marketing, is becoming less creative: haven't you done this subject lots of times before?
Of course "quality" is important to the surfer: they aren't looking for content so badly lit the subject is barely visible, low-contrast, pixellated crap which looks as if it were photographed on an alien planet because the whole shot is green, orange, or whatever.
But you have been around long enough to know that 87.65% of this industry is based on the surfer not rebilling. 39.41% doesn't even want the surfer to sign up at the first site he visits. Content is totally irrelevant to such operators because the surfer won't have a clue what his $$$ are really going to buy until it is too late.
Okay, it gets a bit laughable when some of these guys produce hosted galleries and apparently expect screen caps of a movie that would be more appropriately called "Night on Mars" to (pre-)sell their sites. But they are probably assuming most webmasters are too lazy to check the links they download. And they are probably right. And so what if their click-throughs suck, providing they don't burn much bandwidth, their content costs close to zero, and tens of thousands of their galleries are out there?
The only thing which amazes me in the content field is that some photographers get through complete sessions, often lots of complete sessions, without apparently noticing the lighting (what lighting?) is wrong, that the focus was never set. How much effort would it take to improve their product enough to get 2 cents a pic instead of 1 cent?
Then again, a lot of the up-market stuff, while technically solid, is about as exciting as a slap around the face with a dead haddock: models with zero sex appeal, who look like all they are thinking about is when they can go home; the same tired old poses and uninspired settings. Oh and let's not forget editing: content which
can be cleaned up, but the seller leaves every single buyer to do that, rather than invest some extra time to finish his job.
Your point is obviously valid, but seriously, I think your not-so-subliminal message that your content is better, would be more effective if you tried to make a solid argument for using a marketing model for which that matters. Naive doesn't suit you
